Fun, Food, Family and Failures.

Cows, God and Lego

Over a drink before dinner last night, dearest hubby and I got on to the topic of health and food and the fact that we probably should be giving our bodies an alcohol free day after the madness of Christmas and New Year.

For whatever reason, we got onto the topic of cow’s milk. It got weird as we discussed the benefits of fattening a calf with the stuff and how all mammals have tits and how humans prefer the cow variety of milk even over their own type. Hubby confessed to having tasted the human stuff back in breastfeeding days, it weirded him out. But each day he slops some juice of cow boob in his morning coffee. I told him about how I had watched a clip from the UK where PETA tricked some people into trying dog’s milk and how hilarious their reactions were. (Read more and check the clip for Barkers Milk here).

So, where am I going with this? I explained how after I had watched this clip it made me question the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It made me wonder, why do Jews eat meat and dairy separately and why do Hindus revere the cow? Google threw this at me;

In religion. In Hinduism, the cow is thought to be sacred, or deeply respected. Hindus do not worship cows, although they are held in high esteem. The reason has to do with the cow’s agricultural uses and gentle nature.

The more I read, the more I found that it is the life giving goodness of the cattle that is respected, they are gentle creatures who produce life giving milk and can be used to assist with other parts of agriculture, like a bull pulling a plow. Which leads us to the next strange twist in our conversation. Religion!

Oh hell! Oh shit! I have crossed the boundary! Dad told us to never discuss politics or religion and here I go. Convo went like this…

Me: Whatever you believe, religion is geography. Everyone wants to know why, and using something we can’t see, but trust, means we can make up some ripper stories to help our kids learn. It doesn’t matter where you live, there are lessons to be found in every culture. It might be written in a bible (he is a very lapsed Catholic), or it might be the stories handed down by Aboriginal Elders as Dreamtime. Essentially it is just helping us to observe the laws of survival and guiding us to be good people at the same time….

Him: Refers to some Catholic bible story which my brain failed to register due to being afraid of brainwashing.

Me: You can still quote that, it must have worked.

Him: Gives me a strange look. Then asks a bit about what I believe…

Because of where I was born, and who I was born to, I have been bought up with Christian values and have been given the luxury of participating in Christmas and Easter without the commitment of going to church. I have never been christened. I don’t usually have an opinion other than it is great to have ceremonies for births, deaths and marriages, it helps people to cope. When I think about God, I see a massive human form sitting up in the sky playing Lego with us, creating a world of wonder and experimentation and destruction.

So in our God created Lego world we have cows. She is placid enough to sit around and get her boobs pulled so we can use her essence to assist with our living. She produces offspring which we can kill easily for meat and we use her shit on the garden to help our veggies grow. The cow was created for our survival.

Thank God for cows and Douglas Adams who told us the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in his famous book Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the answer, of course is 42. Perhaps one day we will know the question.